Right now I'm staring at a huge wall, upon which someone has written:
Yo! Sandra! You're O-L-D!

Okay ... the wall's been there for a while ... tall, wide, flat -- a perfect surface for imposing messages ... and I have noticed some scribbles across it before, but all of a sudden over the last couple of days it's all gone rather neon-bright and impossible-to-ignore-blinky / flashing-pay-attention and get-with-the-program-like.

Why?

Gee ... let me think. Could it have anything to do with Mary bringing two new daughters home, Nancy writing about adding Dora to her family, Marie being home with her new two, and NOW Erin announcing that her family is adopting again?

Go figure ...

Yeah. That would be it.

I'm jealous. Plain and simple, I admit it, no doubt about it, JEALOUS, and there's a great big part of my old heart screaming, "Why am I no longer young enough to build a HUGE family through adoption?"

I want Mary's full house, and Erin's soon-to-be-eleven combo. I want to be Angelina Jolie, not for her fame, but for growing family ... and, okay, for her flat tummy.

I want to be somewhere in the middle of an eight -or 10-lane freeway of adoption journeys, not at the end of my two-lane road.

I want to think that, should a child somehow be presented needing a family, I'd be right there, hand in the air, saying, 'Yes, please. We'd love another."

Fact of the matter, though, is that I'm fifty-six-years old, and although there is still a remote chance that there could be a child out there somewhere ... an older child, certainly ... that is meant to be a Benoiton of our specific variety, we will not ever again intentionally plot a path between us and child. The days of planning an addition to our family, of collecting documents and bristling with anxiety as progress through the process takes the bulk of our attention and energy, of preparing our nest for a new little face, are now behind me.

We're done.

My life so far has been what it's been, and it didn't leave much time for building a second family. I am so totally, utterly and overwhelming grateful for the gifts I have been given, and the fact that I have four children is a miracle beyond my comprehension.

But, oh! To be thirty-something again and have the life I have now. In addition to having my original hair color back and my boobs in their perky proper place again, I'd most certainly be filling my family with as many children from as many places as possible.

Things happen in their own time and with reasons we cannot know, so I'm taking what I have with thanks, and sending love and congratulations to my fellow bloggers along with every hope for their families to grow and thrive and brim over with the joy of life lived together.